drupal

Note: This article was originally published on the Growing Venture Solutions website.

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Update: You can vote for Flat World Knowledge here.

From Spring 2008 through the Winter of 2009, I consulted independently for a budding startup called Flat World Knowledge.

FWK is a website/web application that pays authors to write textbooks and makes those books available online for free for anyone to read. FWK also makes it possible to copy and then modify the textbooks, allowing people to create their own distinct, personalized version of a book. Books and study aids are produced via print on demand and can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of a typical textbook.

The end result is that textbooks are more financially and technically accessible to students, more personalized to specific classes, and the typical textbook market is disrupted.

Note: This article was originally published on the Growing Venture Solutions website.

When a form protected by spam prevention measures such as captcha or Mollom is submitted with drupal_execute, validation can fail unless the spam protection is properly suppressed.

This blog post describes the background and solution to a bug that previously existed in the Signup Integration for Ubercart module (uc_signup), and explains the techniques used to fix the bug. It is written with developers and aspiring developers in mind, though other people interested in how Drupal works might also find it interesting.

drupal_execute is a function often used in data imports that allows a developer to take a collection of form values and submit them programatically.
A main reason to use drupal_execute over another technique such as user_save() is that with drupal_execute, Drupal calls the validation and submission functions for the form.

The Context: How uc_signup Uses drupal_execute

Last Saturday, over 130 people gathered in Brooklyn for DrupalCampNYC6, and the event received a bit of coverage in the New York Times. This was great precursor to the 1,400 person DrupalCon this week in Washington, DC. Make sure your sound is on for this video!

This January I'm headed out to scenic Denver, Colorado to co-teach two of three sessions of an Intro to Drupal 6.x class with Growing Venture Solutions. The course is targeted towards people who are new to Drupal and covers several levels of site administration as well as using essential Drupal modules such as Views and CCK (Content Construction Kit), image handling with Imagecache, and creating sophisticated landing pages using Panels. Then we'll cover theming/templating and finally module development, performance and security best practices.
The course happens over three Saturdays, so students can go home (or back to work), tinker around and return brimming with questions and enthusiasm about turning their Drupal sites up to eleven.
If you're thinking of attending, it's best to secure a spot at the pre-2009 discounted rate.
You can read more about the course on the GVS website.

Hope to see you there!
(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1162062936)

Ultra Light Startups, a New York-based tech entrepreneur's group, is
hosting a panel discussion on Open Source content management systems on Thursday, December 4.

I'll be speaking about Drupal along with experts from Joomla (Donna
Vincent) and WordPress (Steve Bruner). People often ask for comparisons between these projects but it's uncommon to find people who have a depth of familiarity in all three systems together in one place, so this promises to be a unique discussion. The panel will be videotaped and made available online.

In order to facilitate a valuable discussion, I've started a list of suggested discussion questions. I'd like to ask you, fellow Drupalers (and any non-Drupalers), to suggest questions that you think will help highlight the differences between these systems and add value to the discussion. Below is my list of suggested questions, starting with ones that seek introductory information to the platforms:

• What kinds of websites/web applications have been built on your platform?
• How large is your development community? Approximatley how many installations are there? How many modules/plugins and themes are available?
• What license covers the code in your project?

Am I going to Drupalcon Boston 2008? You can bet your hidndquarters I am. 

The sections of this tutorial are as follows:

• Brief background on ApacheBench and performance of Drupal Anonymous vs Authenticated Users
• Accessing the cookie containing the Drupal session ID
• Passing the session cookie to ApacheBench
• Verifying that the Drupal installation being benchmarked recognizes the cookie and is serving authenticated Pages

    ApacheBench, also known as 'ab', is a command line program bundled with the Apache Web Server that measures the performance of web servers by making HTTP requests to a user-specified URL. ApacheBench displays statistical information, such as the number of requests served per second and the amount of time taken to serve those requests, that is useful for evaluating (benchmarking) and tuning the performance of a webserver. ApacheBench does a decent job of simulating different types and levels of load on a sever.